Imo and Ekiti states have top the states with the lowest number of out-of-school children in the country with Imo having one per cent and Ekiti state having two per cent.
The Chief of Measurement for Results (M4R), of UNICEF ,Mr Claes Johanson said this in Portharcourt on Tuesday at a Two-Day Media Dialogue on the Multiple Indicators Cluster Survey 6(MIC6) Results.
Johanson also said that the MIC6 results showed that Kebbi, Zamfara and Bauchi states had the highest number of out-of-school with 65 per cent, 61 per cent and 61 per cent respectively.
He said that the figures showed that the country had not seen improvement in the number of out-of-school in the past five years and should begin to look for ways to improve on this area.
It would be recalled that data on the 2018 Digest of Basic Education Statistics by the Universal Basic Education Commission (UBEC) showed that Kano, Akwa Ibom, Katsina, Kaduna, Taraba, Sokoto, Yobe, Zamfara and Bauchi top the highest number.
Also, the 2018 statistics showed that Abia, Kwara, Enugu, Bayelsa, FCT and Ekiti states top the states with the lowest number out-of-school children.
Johanson, however, said that the MIC6 had helped in fishing out data in every sector that would help in analysing how things were working and why they were not working.
” The MIC6 cleared many things. In education and health, we’ve seen some of the most important findings. There is a good news, we’ve seen that fewer children under five were dieing.
” A large of this is driven by increase in immunisation, so we had only 34 per cent children immunised five years ago but now we have 57 per cent so that really calls for celebration and that is something we should really be happy about.
” We also see that there is room for improvement everywhere particularly in education . For the first time we are looking at children that are actually learning and and we see that only 25 per cent have foundational numeracy.
” One out of four children does not even go to school, so the number of out-of-school children is still one in four and that’s the same as five years ago so continuing education is the most important thing,” he said.
Johanson also said that girl-child education played a huge impact on every sector- from health to the education of the child, hence the need for policy makers to step in to address problems that may emanate from adequate focus on education.
He said Sokoto had improved in the area of child marriage as a result of the level of education while urging journalists to report on the why of the MIC6 results so that other states would learn from the activities of states improving.
” Overall, we see that the child marriage drop a lot in Sokoto state. It used to be one in four but now it’s one in three girls can marry before the age of 18.
” So Sokoto has improved on that more than the other states, so we are here with the media to look at the why this has happened,” he said..
He added that UNICEF was working with the government to use MIC6 to inform programmes and learn about what the country could to do differently.
In the same vein, the UNICEF Communication Specialist, Geoffrey Njoku, said MICS 6 was an improvement on previous five years yet presented indices on poor performance on health, education and other areas of SDGs across the 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT).
According to him, the media dialogue with media practitioners was organised to look into factors responsible for poor indices specifically as to why some lingering challenges still remained in some parts of the country.
” We have some good figures and we also have some that are not so good so we want to know why some of these indices are not very good.
” We have to look at it from, could it wrong identification of application of funds or non-application and wrong identification of where to apply the funds,” he said.
Njoku stressed that political will was essential with marked resources to intervene with positive impact that would yield better results on the issues of the sustainable development goals.
He, therefore, called for more action and better interventions to make significant difference in reducing the number of out-of-school children in states with prevalence.
“Good we said that out-of-school is decreased but in absolute numbers we have a population growth that swallows up and minimises the results”
Njoku added that the dialogue was held to get good and better results five years from now on health, education and SDGs through reports in various media platform.
The media dialogue brought together over 40 journalists covering the education and health beats from different media organisations across the country.